"This progress is attributed to China's continuous hard work against corruption," said Liao Ran, Asia-Pacific Regional Program Manager of Transparency International, an international non-governmental organization addressing corruption.

Nevertheless, the results indicate a lot of room for improvement.

Statistics from the Supreme People's Procuratorate show that between January 2003 and August 2006, a total of 67,505 corrupt officials were rooted out, meaning that an average of almost 1,600 officials were put in prison every month. Central Commission for Discipline Inspection figures show that China investigated 13,376 cases of official bribery between August 2005 and June 2006, or an average of some 40 cases a day, involving a total of 3.8 billion yuan.

The figures raise an issue: the harder corruption is fought, the more cases are revealed. One reason that the number of cases has not diminished as expected over the past 10 years, according to Liao, is that corruption is emerging in more areas where it has never been found before.

Before 1998, for example, government procurement was the area that witnessed rampant corruption, but since 1999, when the government took some effective countermeasures, corruption in this area has been controlled. However, new cases of corruption began to appear in the real estate and financial markets. Real estate corruption led to an annual loss of 10 billion yuan over the past 10 years as the industry has amassed significant capital, power and profits but lacks a sound supervision and management system. The majority of major corruption cases in 2006 were related to the real estate industry.

Some also relate the severe corruption situation to China's political and economic situation--in other words, they think that "developed countries have less corruption than developing ones" or that "democratic countries are cleaner than non-democratic ones."

But Liao holds that there is no necessary connection between corruption and a country's political system, and that corruption is mainly related to "opportunity." If there's an opportunity, officials will tend to take advantage of it, no matter whether in China or in Western countries. China's transition from a planned economy to a market economy and from an agricultural society to an industrial one in reality has offered plenty of opportunities for corruption.

The recent corruption cases have three features, according to a publication by the Central Party School: they involve high-ranking officials, a huge sum of money and group corruption. The Chen case involved the embezzlement of 3.2 billion yuan. Li Shubiao, former head of the Housing Administration Center in Chenzhou City, Hunan Province, allegedly misappropriated 100 million yuan of housing funds; this case involved 158 people.

China's anti-corruption work has one feature: the intervention of the Central Government, said Shao Daosheng, a research fellow from the government-affiliated Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. The Chen scandal is a case in point. The main actors in the case are high-ranking officials, and without the support of the higher powers, the case would not have been unearthed or thoroughly investigated. Shao noted that the resistance to the anti-corruption move comes mostly from local governments.

Political reform

The Central Government has developed a program that integrates "education, a system and supervision" to prevent and punish corruption. The discipline inspection departments for the first time have conceived an anti-corruption framework of clean politics and an anti-corruption legal system. The framework is to be primarily established by 2010 and further perfected by 2020.

Offering and taking bribes are two sides of the same coin. Judging from the increasing number of corruption cases, offering bribes is no less prevalent than receiving them, and bribery has infiltrated every corner of social life. But in reality, bribe takers have been put in jail while few of those who offer bribes have been punished, and thus they will continue to bribe.

There is a vivid metaphor to describe the situation: "It is like killing those who catch a cold while letting the viruses loose to infect healthy people."

Statistics show that the proportion of cases involving taking bribes to offering bribes is 100 to 7. On Transparency International's bribery index in 2002, China ranked second-worst in terms of companies offering bribes. No doubt this is a big hurdle for China's anti-corruption efforts.